Voting Open for 2015 Hugo Awards

Voting for the 2015 Hugo Awards opened on May 1, 2015. Members of the 2015 World Science Fiction Convention (Sasquan) may vote until July 31, 2015 using the Online Hugo Awards Final Ballot or by using the paper ballot that will be sent to all members. Members who join Sasquan by July 31, 2015 (the close of voting) are eligible to vote. Members who registered an e-mail address with the 2015 Worldcon will receive instructions including a Personal Identification Number (PIN) for accessing the online ballot.

Finalists for the 2015 Hugo Award were selected by nominations received by the members of the 2014, 2015, and 2016 Worldcons. Only members of the 2015 Worldcon can vote on the final ballot. The ballot includes the finalists for the Hugo Award and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (sponsored by the publisher of Analog), which is not a Hugo Award but is administered and voted upon by the same system as the Hugo Award and is presented at the Hugo Award ceremony.

The Final Hugo Award ballot uses the “Instant Runoff Voting” (IRV) system. Voters rank their preferences among the nominated works (including “No Award,” which is always listed in each category; if it wins, no Hugo Award is presented in that category that year). Voters mark the work they want to win with a 1, the work they would prefer if their first choice was not on the ballot with a 2, and so forth. Voters need not rank all choices.

Sasquan is preparing the “Hugo Voter Packet,” a collection of shortlisted works or excepts of such works provided by the publishers and rights-holders to allow the voters to be better informed about their choices. Sasquan expects to release the Hugo Voter Packet in late May 2015. In addition, many publishers, authors, and artists have made full versions of their nominated works available on their websites.

The results of the 2015 Hugo Awards will be announced at a ceremony on August 22, 2015 at Sasquan in Spokane, Washington. The ceremony is planned to be shown live on streaming video and a text-only coverage of the event will be provided through the Hugo Awards web site. Details of the live streaming and text-based coverage will be announced in August.

So … I only found out accidentally from reading Blog comments that voting has started – the promised email seems to have vanished down some black hole somewhere. I finally managed to figure out how to get the voting number and PIN.

You may want to contact Sasquan to make sure that they have your correct e-mail address.

We announced that voting had started here as you have seen. To stay in touch with announcements from TheHugoAwards.org, you can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or subscribe to our RSS feed. (Links to these are on the sidebar to the right of the page under “Follow Us.”)

The Hugo Voter Packet has not yet been released. Preparing this packet is a very complicated process, requiring negotiation with all of the rights holders to obtain the right to distribute copies of their works to the voters. When the Packet is released, we will make an announcement here. (That’s another reason you may want to follow us, as above.)

The Hugo Awards web site does not prepare or distribute the Hugo Voter Packet. The HVP is organized by each individual Worldcon. There is no guarantee that every finalist will be in the HVP. It is up to the individual rights holders to decide whether to share their works with the voters. The HVP is also not a guaranteed document required by WSFS rules. It is up to each individual Worldcon to decide whether it will continue to do the work necessary to prepare the package.

They seem to have my address alright – I got the original registration emails, and the pin recovery mail.

This site I only found by searching via Google for anything related to the packet. I don’t remember seeing any obvious hint on the main site. But then, it is somewhat hard to find things there. Furthermore, it feels seriously overloaded – so much I was asking myself if there was a DOS going on.